Originally Posted by
old's'cool
What
dddd said. Of course, with enough reinforcement, even a deep pockets company like Walmart has the cajones to saw a handlebar in half and sell it to the public. The thing ain't light, let me tell ya.
For the uninitiated, I'm talking about the drop handlebar modified for twist-grip shifters, on the GMC Denali.
Walmart adapted GripShifters to a road handlebar the easy way, as you said by heavily reinforcing two cut locations around the bars, to allow for some kind of clamping attachment.
The bar first has to be the smaller "mtb" grip diameter, 22mm, instead of the normal 24mm of alloy road bars, in order to accommodate a GripShifter.
The way I did it, starting with a standard 22mm steel road bar with bulged 25.4mm center, I disassembled the GripShifters, then sliced each sleeve part way, to where I had first drilled a stress-relieving hole. I then could slide the sliced inner barrel of each gripshifter along the curves of the steel road bar.
It was a solid setup, and the cable routing was helped by my use of the early 300-series model with straight-down cable exit instead of along the bars. I ended up preferring my shifters elsewhere, at least on my well-fitted bikes that don't have me riding the bar tops most all of the time.
This whole handlebar conundrum extends to the difficulty of sourcing any brand of 42cm bars with 25.4mm clamp size. Only Nitto seems to sell such a bar anymore.